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Forum patterns: The problem of posting to the wrong forum
By frank.nimphius | May 19, 2008
A while back I wrote about the “lost usecase” anti-pattern for questions asked on public forums. Seems that there are many more of those anti-patterns that are worth to discover and document.
In this blog I like to talk a bit about the problem of posting to the wrong forum. I bet all of us have seen questions in a public forum that were asked precisely to the point but didn’t get any answers. Not only that its disappointing for the poster of the question - who might get into trouble with a deadline he has to meet - it is also not a good impression the forum gives if there are questions left with no answer.
Would reposting a question help to eventually get an answer? Well, if the forum provides this information, check the number of views the question got. If there are no more than 20 views then maybe reposting the question is an option. If there are many views for this question, but still no answer, then think about if the problem of posting to the wrong forum applies. There are three variation of this forum anti-pattern
- Wrong product forum
- Cold call on multiple forums
- Internal questions that go external
Wrong Product
This is the most common occurrence I observe and originates from a) questions are posted to the forum of the product where the problem first shows, b) questions are posted to the forum people know, c) questions are posted to the most active forum on a site.
As an example for a): If your favorite Java EE editing environment also supports BPEL, then where should BPEL coding and runtime questions be asked - assuming there exist a BPEL forum ? Correct, the BPEL forum because this is where BPEL birds of a feather meet. Though not unlikely that the question finds an answer on the IDE forum, this is more by coincidence than really to expect. Its always worth browsing a vendors or open source website for a full list of forums. If for example you want to get an answer about JavaServer Faces at SUN’s forum, you know where to go after studying the list of forums they run. Same for other websites.
Cold call on multiple forums
More a cry for help than really a question asked are those posts that are submitted to multiple forums (where multiple means more than two). For example, you may see the same EJB question posted to a SOA forum, an application server forum, a security forum and some 4GL forums that are completely unrelated. While in theory multiple channels increase the chance for an answer, I bet in many cases the answer is “wrong forum, please try …”. While the biggest risk of such a strategy is a waste of Internet bandwidth, it also is a risk of not getting an answer at all because helpers that monitor more than one forum soon detect the duplicate, lean back and decide to leave the answer to the real forum expert of this product forum. In the end you may end up - again - with no answer.
Internal questions that go external
Not so much a problem is the internal question that goes external, but still it could be one that causes a question not getting an answer. All internal developers to a company are also users of the product, why in general its not a bad idea to ask questions on a public forum. The benefit is that the answer to this question is Google indexed and can be shared with all other users of a product.
However, there are some topics you can’t get an answer for on a public forum: A release that is not publicly available, Corporate confidential information and others that better should be handled offline (use common sense for that). Taking internal questions offline to an internal forum or helplist, or address whoever you know directly, increases the chance of a sufficient answer. This is more a pattern for corporate forums, but may also apply to some open source forums.
Solving this problem
So, what is the lesson to learn out of this pattern ? Its that a good question needs to be addressed to the right channel/forum for a short turnaround of the answer. A watering can approach seldom brings up an immediate solution.
However, to be fair to the community, experts on a forum shouldn’t ignore questions that are posted to the wrong forum. Instead they should point the user to the right forum to use if they know the link to it. Personally, I keep a bookmark of the forums that in the past I pointed a user who posted to the wrong forum to. This way I can copy and paste the URL in and at least the question doesn’t hit a roadblock. Sometimes it appears that a community pattern applies to both sides of a problem/solution.
Frank
Topics: General News, Forum Patterns |
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